Wow, it's the site's 16-millionth hit:
207.46.13.132 - - [08/May/2010:13:51:57 -0400] "GET /frivolity/photos/old_misc_sf/sffloat.html HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
It's a web crawler bot from MSN coming through. It's checking to see whether one of my web pages has changed. This particular web page shows one picture: a photo I took while in a warehouse, a photo of a parade float.
My web site has a lot of photos and other pictures.
Once again, I'm using this milestone as an excuse to talk about webmaster traffic-ish stuff. Today, I'm excited about pictures. Google Webmaster Tools recently started showing more data about searches that "point at" this site. This drew attention to something: of people who reach my site by searching Google, over half of them use Google Image Search. That might surprise you. I'm a verbal guy. I'm a so-so photographer. But people show up for the pictures.
Maybe it's not that surprising. The things I write are kind of niche-y. And my verbal nature means that my photos tend to be well-described, at least compared to a typical photo titled "DSC_12345.JPG" with no words around it. So... there's an oil spill offshore and suddenly everybody wants a photo of a blowout preventer, and there's many such photos out there, but most of them aren't labeled... so the search engines don't know about those photos... And thus folks end up on my site.
Here are some image searches that bring people here:
There's an image that I'm not showing here because I think it disappoints folks. Today, if you search Google for San Francisco Zoo Map and look over the search results, you won't see anything that actually links to a map of the San Francisco Zoo. You will see an image from my site which seems useful at first—but when you look closely, you find out it's just a small fragment of the zoo map that I use to illustrate a puzzle hunt report.
I hope that the folks who search for old factory are happier; they get to see, you know, a photo of an actual old factory.
Thank you for visiting, whether you read the articles or look at the pictures.
